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BSP Public Lecture: Precarities of dwelling in the settler-colonial city
25 February 2021, 7:00 pm–9:00 pm
Join us for the fourth instalment of the 2020-21 Public Lecture Series.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Victoria Howard
This event will be held on Zoom. The join link will be emailed to you before the event.
This lecture will examine the precarities of dwelling in the contemporary settler-colonial city. Specifically, how the structuring dynamics of settler-colonialism render and normalise some forms of dwelling unbearable, subjecting specifically racialized (gendered, classed etc) bodies to injury. To do so, we will travel the lines of connection between different sites in contemporary Melbourne: inner-city public housing estates slated for demolition and ‘renewal’, public housing towers whose residents were subjected to punitive and severe lockdown conditions under COVID19, and a high-rise city-centre apartment block called the Portrait Building which exemplifies the contemporary desire to represent ‘Indigeneity’ in the city. Thinking along the lines of connection between these sites, which are not at all immediately obvious, offers useful insights into the formation and structuring of precarity and dwelling in the settler-colonial city.
About the Speaker
Libby Porter
Professor of Urban Planning at Centre for Urban Research, RMIT University
Her work is about displacement and dispossession in cities. She has contributed to an understanding of planning and urban policy as tools of dispossession in settler-colonial cities, as well as the displacement effects of urban regeneration, urban governance, and the politics of urban informality. Her books include Unlearning the Colonial Cultures of Planning (2010 Ashgate), Planning for Coexistence? (with Janice Barry Routledge 2016) and most recently Planning in Indigenous Australia: From imperial foundations to postcolonial futures with Sue Jackson and Louise Johnson (Routledge 2018). Libby has worked in planning and urban policy practice, and taught in planning and geography schools at the Universities of Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow and Monash. Libby co-founded Planners Network UK, a progressive voice for radical planning in the UK and is an active member of the International Network of Urban Research and Action. She is Assistant Editor (Interface) of the international journal Planning Theory and Practice, and a Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy.